So far the Halloween lesson that Sean and I put together has been going great. First I talk about the date of Halloween and the popular colors. Then I show some pictures/clip art and talk about some of the common traditions and activities that Americans do like trick-or-treating, costumes, hayrides, scary movies, parties, pumpkin carving and haunted houses. We practice yelling "Boo!" and "Trick or Treat!" all while some Halloween music is playing in the background (they liked "Thriller" and "Monster Mash." I explain some of the more common figures seen around Halloween like witches, wizards, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, monsters and skeletons. All of the explanations are made easier by some of the movies that have become popular in China like "Twilight" and the Harry Potter movies.
Then we play games for the rest of the class period. We played Pictionary and it was really interesting to see how the students drew some of the words - sometimes I didn't even know what the pictures was but everyone in the class did. Apparently they have different ways of drawing witches, spiders, graveyards and monsters. It was hilarious. Then we did Halloween Mad Libs which was also a riot. After Mad Libs we played Halloween Taboo in groups which produced a lot of creative ways to describe words. The best part of the lesson by far was "carving pumpkins." Each group received an orange balloon and a black marker. The group had to create their own Jack-o-lantern and then explain it to the rest of the class. The students had so much fun it was almost hard to keep them under control. If I had time at the end of class we created a class story starting with the line, "It was a dark and stormy night..." Every student had to give me a word to put on the board and then we went around the room and added on to the story including one of the words from the board.
At the end of class, if they wanted a piece of candy, they had to say "trick or treat" to me before they left class. The lesson was a lot of fun and was certainly made more ridiculous by the fact that I wore my bat ears and glasses the whole time (insert a large number of camera phone pictures here). In addition, during the group activities I walked around and periodically shouted "boo!" and literally scared the beejeebies out of several students. 'Gotta love Halloween!
Sarah,
I'm really enjoying reading your blog and all of the creative things you're doing over there. It sounds like the kiddos are in great hands!
I totally agree with Dave. Also I am so jealous of these students.Haha~~
The picture of you and Sean is really funny, especially your fantastic glasses. I like these glasses.